


The Thing With Feathers

by there_is_a_bluebird



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Ficlet, Gen, Hell, Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-02 00:18:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/there_is_a_bluebird/pseuds/there_is_a_bluebird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” <br/>― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing With Feathers

_Are you afraid of the dark?_

Hell is black, writhing inky black that licks your eyeballs with burning breath that smells like rot. Dean’s carving flesh in the dark, and when she screams, he can taste crystal snowflakes of fear. He can’t see his hands but they’re hot and wet. He lunges in the dark, jaws snapping, catches and crunches her finger between his teeth. The bone snaps easily and he shakes his head like a rabid dog, her raw red voice lost among all the others. Hell’s black because that way he gets no warning when someone is coming up behind him.

But then Hell isn’t black anymore.

Hell is shot through with veins of pure white, creeping tendrils of light that edge towards him, softly waving. Dean looks at them and there’s an empty whirring in his brain. He can’t remember the light. He wonders if he should swing this blade down on the feeble thing, bleed it. It pulsates like all those beating hearts he’s bit. The white light thing touches his skin but he’s forgotten what that means. It doesn’t burn or blister or freeze like the other touches here. He’s staring down at this white light and he doesn’t know what to do. It melts out from him, obscures everything around him until he’s cocooned in this gossamer moonlight, and then he understands.

This is a test.

“I want to stay here,” he says thickly, and the cogs in his throat grind against rust. Blood dribbles out of his mouth. “I want to hurt people, please don’t hurt me Alistair, don’t put me back on the rack, I’ll do anything for you-”

It took ten years for Alistair to teach him to beg so prettily. Sometimes, if he pleaded enough, Alistair would let him pick his punishment down here in the dark that smelt of sweat and tears.

The light brushed against him, and on his skin it was not-burning. What’s the word? Warm.

_Dean Winchester_

Dean lashes out with the blade, a crushing downward blow that parts the cloud and leaves his hand tingling. The white surges back to him like lightning, crackling along his dirty skin with feather-light kisses.

_Righteous Man_

The white is on his skin and all around him. There’s something wet on his face. His shaking lips are dripping words without him even having to think as he falls to his knees.

“Alistair, no, please, please no, don’t do this Alistair - no, it’s not real, it’s not real, I’m here, in Hell, I’ll hurt people, I promise Alistair please I promise please please put me back in the dark-”

The warm white enfolds him and wipes the blood from his hands. Dean swings the machete again, a weak arc into nothingness, blind. The light is everywhere, but – but he’s in the middle of it. He can’t see Hell, and he’s glad and angry and scared all at once.

_I am here to save you_

And he knows what Alistair wants to hear, and he opens his mouth and out falls that clockwork laughter, every little hitch in it one sharp tooth and he tries his best to keep it turning. “I don’t want to be saved,” he giggles, and then laughter turns to ugly, choking sobs that wrack his whole body. He hasn’t been allowed to cry for thirty-five years.

The white isn’t weightless – it settles on his back, smoothes over the hollows of his collarbones and he falls forward into it. He sees nothing, and yet he knows it isn’t real. Sometimes they let him feel his mind breaking when he’s being forced down into the dirt. Sometimes they make him stay through it for every painful push and thrust and tear.

“It’s not real,” Dean mutters into the light as it kisses his wounds away.

“It’s not real,” he slurs when it seeps into his skin and warms him from the inside out, drinks weariness from his marrow. His screaming muscles protest the deft fingers digging into them, working out the knots, and they try to fight to stay tensed and ready for attack.

It’s not real, Dean thinks when he can’t talk anymore, eyes fluttering closed and he sinks into the warm white light, afraid. Terrified because his tired bones are giving in and he’s falling onto his face, and that means Alistair will strap him down on the rack like this and open up his spine. He tries to remember the only reality is pain, but the trick is a good one because it’s offering him something he used to long for. Back…there was a time he wasn’t broken, wasn’t there? He had forgotten…

The white light is hurting him in this way, prodding into the clumsy meat of his brain and ripping up the roots of old memory, things that he killed long ago, his first enemies in the arena – things that were hurting him in all sorts of places – the white light is making him – there’s a word, there’s a thing with feathers.

Dean retches and chokes and tries to scream _get away_ and _don’t leave me_ at the same time. His fingertips sink into the white a little way, and it’s soft under his palm, soft like..like…

He can’t remember.

_It’s not real,_ his heart is screaming, _don’t let it trick you, hurt it, bite it, kill it, bleed it, but don’t believe it-_

Then the light reaches in through his eyes and wraps up his brain in cotton wool and gauze, stems the flow of thick black blood, and in one smooth movement, severs trauma. It just bats it aside, the memories of Hell swept clean out of his head, and Dean doesn’t know where he is or who he is or what’s real anymore, but he clings onto the white thing as they rise.

He wakes up under the Earth and by the time he reaches sunlight, he doesn’t know what’s real anymore.


End file.
